oh girl please

Stacie Marie Laughton, recently elected to the New Hampshire statehouse after years of grifting (not “allegedly”) and campaigning for every office in the Live Free or Die state, got found out about her felonry and said she would resign her office. But now she has exercised her woman’s prerogative and changed her mind again, and will be taking her seat in the legislature after all. (This will probably change in the next half hour, or maybe even already did.) But we have a question, and we are trying to be as sensitive about this as is possible for your Wonkette, because we do not feel like wading through a bunch of waiting-to-be-moderated Jezebel-style comments about looksism, heteronormativity, and cisgender bias: Do male-to-female transgendered people have to try to look like women? Or could any bald dude with a beard put on a shmatte (like, not even bothering to put on some pearls, Klinger-style) and yell, gutturally, “HELLO I AM A LADY NOW”? Is “HELLO I AM A LADY NOW” yet another of Stacie Marie Laughton’s grifts? Let us consider (and remember our manners).

No, seriously, Wonkaderos. Your lgbt compatriots in the comments section do not care for your hilarious excavations of “Man” Coulter, or your related drolleries, so let’s try to actually figure this out instead of just laughing at Laughton’s (damn, girl!) looks. The grifting, however, is always fair game!

Now, your editrix will pull out her Aunt Annie, who used to be her Uncle Johnny, not as a “black friend,” but as her closest experience with the issue. After her implants, her many rounds of electrolysis, and the shaving of her bones, Aunt Annie went to Thailand for the shaving of her bone. Once she was back, she would sit around Commie Mom’s house applying and removing and applying nail polish all day. (It drove Commie Mom, who is not girly, up the fucking wall.) Also: metric fucktons of St. John’s knits.

So in our focus group of one, MTF people really, really want to look like women, getting really overboard about the whole thing, at least until they get more confident and secure.

We are sure without looking up a single BBS or Yahoo Group that trans people probably have a hierarchy whereupon people who are postoperative feel superior to people who are preoperative, and etc. We are not intimating that without surgery (whether top or bottom) Laughton is not trans.

But does there — or does there not? — need to be more commitment than growing one’s hair into a fetching bob?

Now here is another picture of Stacie Laughton. She looks really nice! So is a helping of powder, a good shampooing, and some pink lipgloss and a gold chain all it takes to get our approval that yes, you may consider yourself a woman now? There are plenty of ladies who look like dudes whose sex we do not question (because we are not suave gentlemen driving around in jacked-up pickups, with Confederate flags, charmingly offering to rape the gay right out of them). Perhaps these womyn are grandfathered in, you will forgive the expression?

Beverly Hills surgeon explains at home fix for crepey skin around the arms, legs, and stomach.

Can we be as forgiving of an MTF lady’s laziness in matters of dress and makeup as we are with ourselves? No, probably not. Because of our cisgendered privilege (GRAD SCHOOL, Y’ALL), we may be slovenly and stinky and greasy and gross and no one will question our right to consider ourselves woman, because we got titties. (And vag.)

We used to have a mentally ill Internet stalker (we don’t think she is the same mentally ill Internet stalker as our current one) who was pre-op, and she considered our writing about our vagina a hate crime against her. She was sure — fucking positive — that we were secretly sending her coded messages putting her down for her lack of one. Which, of course, is mentally ill.

What we are saying is we do not have an answer to this, nor are we going to “educate” ourself on the issue with a trip through the (doubtless strident) debate in the corners of the Internet. If you have a complaint about this, please bitch at Dan Savage.

We will leave you with something nice, because it is Morning Nice Time. When our Aunt Annie started living as our Aunt Annie, she was already in her 50s, and had been a man until then. When she first went to visit our grandmother (then in her 80s) and our uncles — IN OKLAHOMA — they introduced her around without a second’s hesitation her as their daughter and their sister. We have seen her — IN OKLAHOMA — and we have seen her in company, and the manly men of Oklahoma have never been anything with her but terribly gallant.

This reminds me of a gif I made a few years back, while pondering gender.

Isyaignert

As a transwoman myself, I will say YES HELL YES please, Stacie, make a goddam effort! Sure, it sucks that cis-women can be slobs and you can’t, but this is the world you live in. How many transwomen do I know who grow their hair out and go out in a pink lacy top – but also dirty work boots and saggy-ass jeans and no make-up or anything, and expect to be respected as a woman-in-the-world, and tell sad stories of how they were kicked out of the ladies’ restroom at the department store, or were beaten up in a bar? How many? I don’t know. Some. Oh, and Dear Wonkette, I can explain all the nail-polishing: estrogen is a powerful thing, and once an MTF gets on it quite often all hell breaks loose and for 6 months or a year, no matter how old you are really, you become a 14-year-old basketcase who doesn’t know wtf how to deal and you go crazy with the girly-girl stuff, but this too shall pass, as you saw, and then everything is cool, as long as you take 5 FKG MINUTES to make yourself look OK before you go out, as Stacie didn’t that day, apparently. People really do appreciate that, even cretinous men who knew you before as Mike, and they will smile at you and hold the door open, which is soooo creepy in a way, but then you can’t help but think, “Fuck yes, that was cool,” and then feel kind of stupid for thinking that, but then you think, “What the hell, it was.”